RE: Savage Aural HotbedHere, I have to say I was intrigued far more by the background than what was in the foreground. The atonal droning sound I find appealing. The incessant 'klonk' of the guy hitting the metal cylinder, though, was kind of impossible to ignore, and I was trying to!

RE: NTSCThis is closer to my taste, though I had to skip around the half-way point because it was giving me a headache! Interesting visual aspect though.

I've been a long time fan of droning and strange kinds of music but I'm really picky. I only really have time for things that I could never make myself -- things where I detect an inimitable spark of artistic ingenuity. I particularly respond to the more dedicated artists that work with long tones. The ones who have a life-long engagement with the form. To make this kind of music is essentially easy but to do it well is almost impossible! Not really a huge fan of synth drones because I own a few synths and the stuff is too easily made, for instance. Some favorites:

Lamonte Young Tamburas of Pandit Pran Nath and Midnight 2xcd by Pandit Pran Nath himself are basically the greatest purely droning albums I've ever heard and I don't expect to ever find music that topples them (though I will continue looking/listening!) I listen to this stuff almost daily and it is always stimulating. Harmonics! Overtones! A dense jungle of inexplicable alien sounds all coming from just two gourds and 8 strings! The latter album also has majestic, though understated, singing. Time seems to disappear when you listen to these two albums.

Catchwave by Takehisa Kosugi is also near the top of my list. A solo performance with tape loops and violin and voice. Unusually direct and perfectly distilled. Dedicated. See his band Taj Mahal Travellers for similar paradoxical futuristic caveman drone that is almost as good. They were early-mid '70s, exclusively played outdoor concerts, and use massive amounts of echo effects, creating a sorta organic bubbling tapestry of weirdness.

There is a Derek Bailey and Jamie Muir album from 1981 called Dart Drug which was a seminal influence for me. The first music I ever heard with no notes. A kaleidoscope of colorful percussion sounds, thoughtfully arranged and performed live in spacetime. I heard this in high school because of the King Crimson connection and it basically ruined my life (in a good way!)

Jussi Lehtisalo from the Finnish band Circle released his first two recent solo albums called Rotta and Interludes For Prepared Beast which are both worth a look. The former is pure drones and some very, very sparse melodic bass improvisation, deep as can be, and the latter is some kinda incredibly unique thing that sounds like an unusually confusing acid trip, all scrambled up, with prominent disembodied metal riffs colliding with weird clicking alien whirring sounds -- I have it filed firmly in the category of "masterpiece" as the thing is clearly sculpted with utmost care and precision! It seems almost like an alien artifact or something. He also has a side project called Doktor Kettu which basically sounds like a bunch of instruments falling down a staircase over and over again. Jussi/Circle is always inexplicable and wonderful, thought-provoking and, in the final analysis, completely confounding. Just the way I like it.

All this music raises a ton of questions (if you let it!) and, personally, it has been a great pleasure searching for the answers! Good luck, dude.

Most of my oddball avant drone is by academic composers. Perth neuroscientist Alan Lamb is a bit different, though his contact mic recordings of telegraph wires in the Australian outback share a lot of qualities with longitudinal vibration / long-string instrument compositions by the likes of Alvin Lucier and Ellen Fullman.

Michael Prime is the most important musician today working with bioelectrical recordings of plants. His 2000 L-Fields, which recorded the electrical musings of hallucinogenic Cannabis sativa, Amanita muscaria, and Lophophora williamsii is a classic of the field. Unfortunately, it isn't available on YouTube, so here's a live performance of him performing a collaborative piece with some sort of variagated aspidistra:

I really dig the Sounds To Soothe A Nervous Robot compilation, featuring some bands on the outer, more experimental fringes of the Elephant 6 collective. Black Swan Network (an Olivia Tremor Control side project featured on the comp) also put out an album of ambient nightmare music.

sarahell: i'm sure they are and i just didn't get them. possibly if i listened to them today i'd understand them utterly. all i know is that they made me flee back to the safety of "renaldo and the loaf play struve and sneff".

but I also feel like lumping everything under the "experimental" category ghettoizes it a bit. Why not call the rock band, a rock band, the field recordings, ambient, the sewing machines through contact mics, industrial? Especially if what they are doing is within these more descriptive genres.

To be clear, I'm talking from the perspective of someone who has worked in marketing/promotion for music in this vein for about 15 years.

i think it's a good descriptor for plenty of things -- and in terms of the examples in my post, it would depend on what the music sounds like, how the musicians make it, and how they want to describe the music they make. you can have an "experimental rock band" that might be best described as "experimental" or one that gets called that because their music is "a bit different"

worth noting here that varese vehemently denied that has music was "experimental" insofar as he got all of the experimenting out of the way before he did the actual composing.

none of the words we use for genres are really accurate, of course. if we have "progressive" music which progresses nothing we can certainly have "experimental" music which isn't.

my issue with listening to or making sounds like these is that you're setting the bar pretty high by taking away melody. there's noise that appeals to me on a visceral level but it's a small subset of the noise that's out there. it's hard to explain or justify the rationale or appeal for sound without melody, like taking a typewriter and using it to draw pictures on a piece of paper using only the letter "b". sure it's artistically valid, but it's also willfully perverse in a way that sticks the person doing it in a niche.

But perverse isn't an on-off switch, it's as changeable and subjective as everything else under discussion - at an experimental show, you may as easily from moment to moment be having an experience of sublimity, of being purely challenged, or feeling pride in spotting the reference, or feeling thrill at enjoying (or ostensibly "enjoying") something that would be a trial to most people. What might have seemed perverse, and your whole point of fascination, when you're 18 can be another lineage, another exercise in box-checking, when you're 38. Or it can unexpectedly dial right back into that feeling of the perverse!

The question of who is acting and who is represented can be a huge part of it, which I think mattresslessness' and sarahell's posts speak to - that notion that experimental music is also a social space apart seems to be an invitation for some spectacular exercises in privilege, posturing, and hateful wastes of other people's time (and money) that just reproduce the larger inequalities and ways of thinking. I guess I keep coming back because there can also be moments that rewrite your thoughts of what a person can be in the world - I'm thinking of the past year, watching Olivia Block, one of those shows that starts out good and gets better in retrospect, the way that she picked up and manipulated her array of objects, which in turn echoed in the objects in the sound field. The result for me wasn't just viscerally good music, wasn't just well-executed and interesting; it also spoke somehow of another approach to everyday life, how a body engages with technology, and (not to assign this motive to Block, only describing where her performance got me) also had me reexamining habitually gendered thinking on my part about sound and performance.

Finding a place where you can have an encounter like that is weirdness too...in a lot of ways, speaking just for myself, experimental music is more a way to re-enchant, or repudiate, or estrange the everyday world, rather than a good unto itself. Music does not at all have to be experimental by anyone's definition for that to happen - but having that notion of "progressiveness" coming pre-attached to it helps me see it that way.

Has there been a mention of Valerio Tricoli's 'Miseri Lakes' album yet? That is a very unusual experience, especially on headphones late at night. Quietly nightmarish. All these acoustic knocks and scrapes and whispers.

dagnammit, in an attempt to counter to my primary impulse to be a grouchy naysayer, i spent ages typing out a "helpful"& "friendly" list of stuff not yet mentioned above & then closed the freakin window before posting. nnng!y'all know jandek's free-depressive folk-blues, anyhow. most of you prob also aware of the awesome music and supreme rug pull after so many years of it, that this was:maze of the phantom.also this thread from the dim and distant, in which i recommend all the same stuff i always do like a broken record: Most trepanningly psychedelic lp?i'll see if i can summon the zeal to reconstruct my unposted post.there was something to do w/ thomas köner, who some spod had posted on the youtubes:DAIKANlast track from KAAMOSsome ruminations about the excellence of farmers manual, pxp, reminiscences of heated discussions in These Records, running the oskar sala myspace site a hundred years ago.i love the rinkydink dressage/fine procelain classical baggage that interferes with my expectations of flat/just notes, subharmonics, ringmodulations & radiophonic echoes in this& pauline's roots, just because. i think the bernard parmegiani 12 cd set is an infinitely more rewarding listen than the pauline set, though. that would depend on my personal preferences.and if you dig schlocky psychoacoustic shockers, nobody quite touches dave phillips.you need to get xyzzzz in here to type sth about henri chopin.i think i lamented that the excellent monotract CDs on ecstatic peace are always remaindered at pennies (although that does mean i can also afford to eat), and advised people to get involved with franco battiato if they hadn't already.there's also ubuweb, which is a smashing resource, lots of free (sometimes lo-res, but, hey! free!) mp3s of roland kayn, c.spencer yeh etc to be grabbed. some smashing beckett radio plays also.i'll leave it there for now. things to do. bye bye for now.

i've had hundreds of people who fit this thread's bill play at my store but i think jeff might be my fave. you should definitely check out noise nomads tapes and records. i don't know how many times he's played at my place, but i think this was the loudest. room-changing, molecule-smashing loud.

not sure what other thread to post this in, but i had a tidbit>question and a question

tidbit > question: i was reading through part of michael nyman's book on Experimental Music from 1974 (after reading that jim o'rourke was super into as a kid) a few months ago, and it was interesting to see his distinctions between experimental and avant-garde music. experimental music has an unpredictable element, in its performance or as a feature of processes, the changing nature of the outcome is the point - "the experimental composer is interested not in the uniqueness of permanence but in the uniqueness of the moment...By contrast the avant-garde composer wants to freeze the moment, to make its uniqueness unnatural, a jealously guarded possession." that's a useful distinction for me, at least, because for a long time i made the mistake of conflating the two into a more general category of "weird". anyway, just wanted to throw that out there because i wondered if nyman's definition of experimental / distinctions with avant-garde are still seen as foundational knowledge or if his take on things was superseded at some point.

question: what is the difference between musique concréte and acousmatic music?

He's definitely influential, I mean, he's Michael Nyman, but in terms of musicians and composers, there really isn't much in the way of universal agreement about the definitions of these terms. And at this point, there is also the problem that what was "avant-garde" in the 1960s and 1970s is still being done and copied/adapted but is it actually "avant-garde" 40+ years later? Definition and category-wise, at this point in time, you end up having to separate the novelty and boundary-pushing aspect of avant-garde composition from the aesthetics and techniques of the historical avant-garde.

I think more non-academic musicians tend to say "experimental" over "avant-garde" because the latter sounds academic and pretentious? Neither are particular descriptive in terms of aesthetics though ... sorry, I spent almost 2 decades thinking about this from a booking and marketing perspective so I'm probably rambling and wasting space

fwiw, one of the musicians/composers I worked with a lot (who uh, played with Jim O'Rourke at various points in their youths) disliked being categorized as "experimental" because he wasn't experimenting in his music -- he knew what he wanted it to do and sound like. So he kinda agreed w/Nyman's definitions in that.

i don't think genre terms in general have much taxonomic value, especially as they aim to draw more and more precise distinctions, so that "thinking about this from a booking and marketing perspective" is probably one of the least wasteful ways of thinking about them

xpno way, you're not rambling at all! i dabble in this stuff but rarely get in deep, so it's good to hear from someone who knows a lot more!

i guess that regardless of whether his idea of experimental lines up with anyone else's, i do appreciate his efforts. it's something new for me to think about when listening to some kinds of music - which parts of the music are planned, and which are left to chance or more open-ended in some way.

both terms are French and come from Studio GRM, coined in different decades by different directors. concréte was Schaeffer's hardline manifesto focused specifically on manipulated recordings, and in some ways took an oppositional stance to WDR's emphasis on synthesized purely electronic music and the control and 'authorship' entailed therein (i.e. no self-respecting composer should allow appropriated pre-authored sounds and call that a composition). by the 60's most composers were helping themselves equally to the techniques of both schools, so under Ferrari & then Bayle's stewardship of the GRM 'acousmatic' was a way of underlining the core concepts of concréte & reduced listening - the aesthetic appreciation of fixed recorded sounds entirely apart from the events that produced them - while letting composers also help themselves to oscillators alongside their squeaky door cut-up. think Parmegiani, as happy close-micing a fireplace as he is playing Coupigny synth. late 60's also saw Bayle introduce the Acousmonium, i.e. concerts of tape works, diffused using dozens to hundreds of speakers placed throughout the room; live performance is in the mixing, the spatial movement of the sounds through the room, rather than in 'live' sound generation.

'acousmatic' is maybe a slightly tweaky rebranding that never caught on as deeply as the original manifesto but it's a way of emphasizing the continuities in the work that follows on from Schaeffer

I've always taken-away from "experimental" the meaning that "some of this performance will consist of very deliberate fucking around with unpredictable results"-- not the same as improvisation, but rather the opposite-- the composer/performer will engage in a process that allows for an unpredictable outcome, a controlled loss-of-control.

As for "avant-garde" I just relate it to the traditional pre-20th c. version of what I think it means. The composition will deliberately subvert the notion of composition in order to make an oblique statement and/or commentary on the nature of composition itself (and society etc.)